


Hello, Operator

by Toft



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Phone Sex, Sexual Roleplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-12 02:16:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18001898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toft/pseuds/Toft
Summary: Harold watches Agent Reese on long stakeouts. At these times, he sometimes calls a phone sex line to speak to someone called John (surely not his real name). These two things are unrelated.





	Hello, Operator

**Author's Note:**

> This story came about after Thefourthvine sparked a plotbunny about an assassin running a sex line on stakeouts - thankyou to TFV, Isagel, Emef, and other twitter friends for playing with the idea with me and encouraging me! Thanks to wychwood for betaing an earlier version of this.

Harold rubs his eyes, and turns down the brightness of the screen currently showing three grainy security camera feeds with different angles on Reese’s car. Reese has been in there for nearly five hours, and will certainly be in there for another three at least, unless his handler pulls him out; his target is still stuck in traffic after a crash on the expressway. John’s handler is in possession of that intelligence, but her concern for John’s comfort is minimal; she certainly will not pull John out. And Harold is sufficiently impressed with Reese’s dedication and work ethic that he does not believe he will leave his post without orders or until he has eliminated his target. It is the principal reason Harold is still watching him.

He turns his bleary eyes to his code, and blinks as the letters run into each other. Sleeping would be irresponsible – besides, there’s a certain fascination in watching Reese, hour after hour, knowing how cramped and uncomfortable he has to be in that small car, probably hungry and dehydrated too. How does he occupy himself? Reese is the latest of a series of potential collaborators Harold has been monitoring; he is the only one still in the running after two months of rigorous surveillance. He is highly skilled, excellent at his job, of course, but there’s something else which keeps Harold glued to his screens; he seems to have no personal needs, no desires, at all.

Harold is not so lucky. With a quick, guilty glance at the screens, he dials a familiar number and puts on his hands-free headset. When he hears the connection, he speaks the extension number, and drums his fingers on the desk so he won’t cross them.

“Well, hello, Harold.”

“John,” Harold says, relaxing all at once into his chair at the familiar, gravelly voice. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be working tonight.” Stomach already fluttering in anticipation, he rubs his hand over his thigh. His cock begins to thicken just at the sound of John’s voice, Pavlovian, but he doesn’t touch his fly, not yet. He’s had a long day, he deserves to draw this out.

There’s an amused – dare he think, fond? – note to John’s voice. “I’m always here for you, Harold.”

There’s a creaking sound on the other end of the line, a slight exhale. Harold turns the volume way up. He likes the reminder that John has a body, not just a voice; he likes to hear John shift in his seat, change position as they talk. He flatters himself that John enjoys their conversations too, that maybe he’s not just very skilled at pretending.

“Just getting comfortable. What are you in the mood for tonight?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

One of the things Harold likes about John – the reason he only speaks to him, now, and if he isn’t working his line, hangs up – is that John doesn’t hurry him, or try to impose some tacky fantasy on him. He lets Harold slowly ease into the idea that his words have no consequence, that he can let his brain detach from his mouth and exist at a level of pure desire for a short while. He is accustomed to forgetting that he wants things. 

“You up late working again?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“You work too hard, Harold. It’s good that you’re taking a break.”

John’s voice is low, almost whispery, as if he’s always trying not to be heard. Harold wonders, sometimes, whether that’s his natural voice, but he likes the illusion of privacy it conjures. This is their secret.

“I could say the same of you.”

John’s husky, quiet laugh sends shivers down his spine. He rubs his finger lightly over his fly. 

“You alone in your office, Harold? You sure nobody’s going to walk in? Some security guard doing the rounds?”

“I – I work from home,” Harold says weakly. Then, struck by a bolt of inspiration, “I suppose you might walk in.”

“I’ve worked security,” John murmurs. “Lights on after hours, I might come by to check it out.”

“You know I work late sometimes.” It comes out accusatory, defensive. Harold unzips his fly and cants his hips back to give himself a little room. He glances up at the screens, just in case. No movement.

“Yeah, I know that.” Harold can hear the smile in John’s voice. “I know how you nerds get. Maybe I’d come by just to shake you up a bit. I think you’re up there looking at porn.”

“You’re being officious. A bully.”

“I’ve seen you watching me, Harold.”

“I didn’t… it’s the uniform.” 

Harold was never able to stand corporate security. He’s been at the receiving end of petty men and women hungry to taste their small amount of power in whatever indignities they could inflict. But this fantasy – it’s doing something for him. John, generically good looking, has caught his eye. Harold looks for him, looks at him every morning, a small bright spot on his way up to his mundane cover at NFT. John has caught him looking and raised an eyebrow, as if he sees straight through to Harold’s lurid imagination, and Harold’s cheeks have burned all the way up to the eighteenth floor.

“You’ve got a thing for guys bigger than you.”

“How tall are you?”

There’s a moment of hesitation, just a shadow, but then John says easily, “Six one.”

“Yes,” Harold says, nonsensically. Unable to stand it any more, he slides his hand into his boxers and wraps his hand around himself. He’s fully erect, just from indulging in this fantasy, a learned response to promised pleasure. It wasn’t so easy, the first few times, but John is very, very good. Harold is getting quicker at making the shift.

“Maybe I think if I catch you watching porn, you’ll do something for me.”

Such confidence. Harold can imagine it. His mouth waters at the thought.

“You think you can blackmail me into giving you sexual favours?”

“I don’t think you’d take much persuading.”

“Perhaps not.” Harold’s breath is coming short. He’s stroking himself slowly, letting it build.

“You already got it out?”

“Yes. When you come into the room. I’m touching myself.”

“You watching porn?”

“No. I’m – I’m thinking about you. And you come in.”

“Are you embarrassed?”

“Yes. I think I might have a heart attack.”

“I bet you blush.” John’s voice has gone deeper, gravelly, the way it does when they’re deep into a – a scene? Harold isn’t quite sure how to describe what they do. John shifts again, and Harold can hear it.

“I do. It’s very visible.”

“Mm.” John sounds pleased, and Harold feels it now, that hot flush running up his neck and cheeks, just because he has pleased John. His heart is racing, and it’s hard to keep from sounding out of breath. “You want to suck my dick, Harold?”

Harold closes his eyes, and holds his hand still, squeezing lightly. “Yes. I – you could persuade me.” He glances at the screens. Reese hasn’t moved. Perhaps he should check on the expressway traffic.

“You’re shy?”

“Not – not exactly.”

John turns on the charm. Harold has to smile, a little, hearing it. There’s an edge of wry self-deprecation to John’s roleplaying – we’re just playing, it says. This a little silly, but that’s okay. Harold was too self-conscious to indulge in this kind of fantasy at first, but John has slowly been pushing him into more creative territory. “Hey – it’s Harold, right? Don’t be embarrassed, Harold. I’m bored, you’re bored. There’s no-one else here. What’s wrong with us having a little fun?”

He stops trying to control his breathing, and lets himself sound as aroused as he feels. “If someone caught us – the cameras.”

“Let me take care of that. I know you want this. You swipe in every day and you stare at me, you think I didn’t notice you?”

“You noticed me?” Harold tenses at the yearning he can hear in his own voice, but John keeps talking, makes it part of the fantasy. The man Harold is at NFT would fantasize, guiltily, about the tall, handsome security guard who seems to know exactly what Harold thinks about when he sees him. He’d imagine, sometimes, what might happen if John-the-security-guard silently followed him into the elevator, up to the server room, waited until they were alone and muscled him up against the wall to whisper in his ear, offering filthy things.

“I noticed you, Harold. I sit in that goddamned booth all day and I got to thinking about how you’d sound if I sucked you off. Would you like that?”

“Yes,” Harold gasps, eyes closed. He starts twisting his hand in earnest, pulling at his cock, chasing release. Urgency builds in his belly, and he ignores the pain that shoots up his hip to spread his legs a little wider.

“Or maybe you’d like me to bend you over that desk? I think I deserve a little R&R after making you feel good. How about you let me put my hard dick in your ass?”

Never mind that in reality it would probably take hours of preparation before Harold could comfortably take penetration. In the fantasy, he could bend easily over the desk and John could pull down his already-loose pants and underwear, strip him embarrassingly naked from the waist down, spread his legs, and push inside him all at once, a hot, eager violation.

“You want me to fuck you, Harold? 

“Yes,” Harold chokes. He’s so close to orgasm, he almost ignores the flash of movement on the screens that catches his eye. _Not now_ , he thinks – but it’s just a truck passing by the end of the alley, caught in the corner of one camera’s field of view. “Fuck me.”

John sounds breathless too, now. “You’re so tight, you feel so good. You needed this, right? Let me fill you up. I’ll take you real slow -”

Harold comes, spilling into his hand, arching back in his chair, and for a moment he stares at the screens unseeing, boneless and warm. Then he frowns. The truck is backing across the screen, lights flashing, soundless. But he can hear a faint, tinny echo of its reverse alarm. Where is the sound coming from? Disoriented, he almost goes to the window to see if there is another truck there, then he realizes it’s coming from the phone, from John’s line. How strange.

“You good there, Harold?”

John’s voice is comfortable, satisfied. Harold feels as if his brain is not fully online. On autopilot, he taps the keyboard to bring up the expressway cameras. The traffic has cleared. Where is Reese’s target? The truck on the screen stops backing up, turns, and drives out of view. The beeping on John’s line stops. One by one, five men walk into the camera’s frame of view, just twenty yards from Reese’s car. They are holding automatic weapons.

Without really thinking about what he is doing, Harold pulls up Reese’s comm line. He’s had it open the whole time, of course, but Stanton has not contacted Reese for hours; the oddity of that only now occurs to him. It isn’t too difficult to send a series of tones into Reese’s ear. On the other line, he hears John’s startled exclamation and, with the volume still turned all the way up on their shared line, he just about hears the tones too.

Harold feels his breath freeze in his chest. The bizarre, almost whimsical suspicion has now bloomed into paralyzing near-certainty. He still isn’t entirely sure he isn’t dreaming.

“John,” he says. He clears his throat. “Are you by any chance parked in a black 2012 Toyota, waiting to kill a man named Soames?”

There is absolute silence on the line.

“If you are, I suggest you move, because five men are approaching your vehicle from behind with submachine guns.”

The dial tone rings in Harold’s ear. He watches the silent feeds for a few paralyzing seconds where nothing happens, and the men move slowly closer to the car. Then suddenly, the car’s rear lights flare on, and the car lurches backwards. The men jump to get out of the way; one of them manages to discharge a stream of bullets into the car before it sweeps sideways, crushing his body into the alleyway wall. Harold winces, and catches his breath again as the door on the driver’s side swings open and John rolls from the moving car and in a fluid movement brings up his weapon and fires, dropping one of his four remaining assailants. His body disappears into the shadow under a dumpster, and Harold can’t see him anymore. He sits at the keyboard, almost hyperventilating, mind an absolute blank. On reflex, he dials the line, and speaks John’s number. He thinks John won’t pick up. He knows John won’t pick up. Then he hears the click, and the sound of John breathing.

“Are you all right?”

John doesn’t respond, and Harold’s heart rate spikes – he could be bleeding, dying –  
but then he thinks, of course, John can’t make a sound, or the other men will hear where he is. He’s allowed Harold to get through because he understands that Harold can see the alley, and John can’t. It’s hard to reconcile Reese, the ruthless professional killer, with the playful, soft-voiced John. But Harold must, this instant, or John won’t live beyond the next ten minutes. In a split second of hysteria, he thinks, at least he discovered what Reese does with his time on stakeouts. It was the same thing Harold does.

“One man is at your two o’clock, behind the car. One is climbing the fire escape to get to the walkway above you. One I can’t see but I think he’s on the other side of the dumpster.”

The alley is still for a few agonizing seconds. Then the sound of gunfire erupts through the speaker. Harold can’t see John, he can’t see him – then a body drops from the walkway above the dumpster. Two left between John and the exit to the alley. Harold pulls up the map of the city block, then the plans for the two buildings on either side of the alley.

“John, in the wall opposite you is a door. The building it leads into is abandoned. If you can break the lock, it’s a side entrance into what used to be an industrial kitchen, and you can get out to the street front or up to the roof.”

Silence. Then, a whisper, “How old are the plans?”

It takes Harold a few more precious seconds with the tiny print. “Eight years old. The building’s been empty for a year. The man behind the car is coming out.”

John fires a few covering bullets from his hiding place, just his gun and gun hand exposed to view from the alley. He isn’t aiming, but it’s enough to send his assailant back into hiding. The man on the other side of the dumpster hasn’t moved. Perhaps he’s dead. Harold can hear John’s breathing, slow and controlled.

“Okay,” John whispers, then, quicker than the poor-quality cameras can follow, he fires two bullets at the door lock from across the alley, in the dark, and runs out straight at it. It takes him one more try to get through it, during which time the two remaining of Soames’ men recover themselves enough to fire on him. Harold stares in disbelief as John disappears from his screens into the dark recess in the alley wall. He still has the line active, though.

“How long do I have?”

“They’re behind you. Take a right out of the kitchen, then a left.”

A text to Harold’s phone tells him that the escape route he’s been working on for Reese is coming together.

“The first right should take you out into the street. There’s a cab waiting on the northwest corner of the street.”

There’s a grunt, quickly cut off, then a sharp crack, and silence. John must have lost his earpiece, or phone, or both, and they have no line of communication. Harold has located a camera that covers half of the street on the other side of the building. He can see the cab, but not the stretch of street John has to cross to reach it. He waits, nauseous with fear. He knows John’s capabilities. He should be able to overpower two men in a level field, even experienced thugs with military backgrounds. But he’s fired seven times, and his magazine holds eight.

There’s a blur of movement on the camera as John reaches the cab and throws himself into the back seat. The cab pulls away. Heart in his throat, Harold patches himself through to the cab driver’s radio, despite the risk – John already knows far too much about him, it hardly matters now – to give instructions to the driver. Thinking fast, he sends him to one of his safehouses, and at the same time, tries to locate Stanton and John’s team. The results are as he suspected – he just hadn’t thought it would be this soon. He calls the cab driver’s cellphone, and tells him he wants to speak to his passenger.

“Hello again, Harold. Thanks for saving my life. You want to tell me what’s going on?” 

John sounds the same. Raspy, amused. How can he possibly sound the same? Harold clears his throat.

“Agent Reese, I’m afraid Agent Stanton has been given orders to kill you. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

Reese pauses. “Do you have proof of that?”

“I can give it to you.”

“In person?”

Harold swallows. “I’m – I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“I don’t bite, Harold. Unless you ask nicely.” 

Oh, God. His plans for this meeting – insofar as he had any plans – were in such a formative stage, and they have gone so spectacularly sideways that he can’t even conceive of what he is supposed to do. John wasn’t supposed to know him, let alone know him in such an intimate – how can Harold possibly offer him employment, now? Although, in a way, he has been employing him for months. But if he wants to preserve this relationship – which, he’s discovering, he does – he must handle this very carefully. 

“I should – I should be clear, I had no idea until the moment before I spoke to you that the man I was speaking to for, ah, recreation and the CIA agent I was surveilling were the same person. I think, that is, I would prefer that henceforth we… we conduct ourselves professionally.” 

“I’m always professional,” John murmurs. “But I have two jobs. Which one did you have in mind?”

John is baiting him, Harold realizes, cold gripping his stomach. Of course he is.

“I recognize you are trying to work the leverage you have in a situation which must be very unnerving,” Harold says, steeling himself. “I want to make an offer of employment to you. In your capacity as… that is, the capacity in which the CIA employed you.”

“You seem pretty confident that’s a past tense situation.”

“You can make your own decision once I show you the information I have,” Harold says, gaining in confidence. “Regardless, you will be free to work for me or to go your own way. We can discuss the details when – but first, you’re not injured?”

“I’m fine,” John – _Reese_ – says. He sounds bemused, now. A little more, perhaps, like himself. No longer flirting, thank goodness.

“You’ll be at my safehouse in about seven minutes. Please don’t attempt to contact anybody.”

“I know how safehouses work, Harold.”

Harold feels a pang at the familiar, fond note in John’s voice under the mild exasperation. He can’t respond to it, must not; it’s as much a performance now as it was when they spoke on the phone. Why on earth John chooses to run a sex line to pass the time is his own business, and none of Harold’s. It is now out of bounds for him to think about it. The John he spoke to was a persona, one he enjoyed, and all the more compelling as a heretofore unexpected facet of the psychological profile of John Reese. It’s just a shame that – that –

“I hope you have some whisky at this place,” John says.

“There should be whatever you need.”

“Sure you don’t want to come and share it with me?”

“I don’t –”

“I’m still kind of wound up, Harold. We never finished our conversation. Normally I’d have some time to jerk off after.”

Harold stares at the wall, mouth open.

“Did you usually,” he blurts out, before he can stop himself, then closes his eyes, cheeks flaming at the thought of the cab driver hearing John say that to him. “I always assumed John wasn’t your real name. It seemed too… apposite.”

“Why do you think I used it?” John says easily. “I think we should get to know each other better. You’re a pretty interesting guy.”

Harold looks at his hands. This is a terrible idea. An appalling, monumentally stupid idea.

“I was having a pretty shitty evening until you called,” John says softly. “And then my evening got a lot shittier after you called. It sounds like I’m out of a job and my boss wants to kill me. I’d kind of like to meet Harold before that happens. He’s sweet.”

“Are you going to tell me I was your favourite?” Harold forces the words out around a bitter tightness in his throat.

“Are you going to tell me I wasn’t yours?”

The cab pulls up outside the safehouse. “I’m going to give this man back his phone, Harold. You come by if you want.”

“John –”

John hangs up.

Harold sits for a moment. He has the sensation of being at the brink of a precipice. Then he picks up his keys.


End file.
